This is a peculiar behavior under porteus, that I did not have under other distributions. It has plagued my pleasure for years intermitently with using my favorite desktop:
I get into porteus and there is no way to access wifi. To remediate, I load into windows put on the wifi on and back into porteus the wifi is now functioning. See:http://forum.porteus.org/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=2055

In the above, brokenman states a temporay solution, that dates back for the old timers to the era of slax:I have heard only one other such strange instance back in slax when the user swore that booting into windows and enabling wifi allowed them to connect in linux too. I don't see how it could be related unless the wifi carders are working with MS and have an onboard chip (not likely).

The problem is that I have erased definitely windows from my toshiba z930 satelite laptop. All I have is linux distributions all over the hard disk.

In despair of having to reinstall windows otherwise than as a virtualguest in porteus, I have tried the same procedure by booting in Elementary OS. There I have restored wifi switch to on. The same result was there porteus wifi would be again functional.

Though I have repeated these manipulations a few times, I am unable to reproduce the cutoff of the wifi.

My reflexion here is that porteus is linux and ubuntu is linux? What is missing in porteus?
Answer (thanks to : Some soft or hard switch is off. You have to enable them. A small package called rfkill will permit to enable the wifi switchs to on. The explanation and resolution could be found in:http://www.digimantra.com/linux/rfkill- ... ux-laptop/

Last edited by francois on 30 Aug 2014, 20:07, edited 4 times in total.